\n<\/p>\n
“While we had the work and support of many animators around the world, the entire pre-production, most of it, in terms of the look of the world, the feel of the world, the architecture, the design, was pretty much set in Singapore by a Singaporean team,” Han said.<\/p>\n
He explained that the local team would produce detailed reference packages for studios working overseas to ensure the historical accuracy of the environments and characters unique to the period, such as Malay boatmen, coolies from China and merchants from India and Arab countries.<\/p>\n
“We created a very detailed package to be distributed with the international teams, so they know exactly what to follow,” he said. “Many of them have never been to Singapore, much less Singapore in the 1920s and 30s.”<\/p>\n
For one scene, an overseas team was asked to create a layout of 1920s Chinatown using references supplied by the Singapore team. Some of the early work came back looking, Han recalled with amusement, like Paris.<\/p>\n
“So we knew the Singapore team had to do the homework first,” he said.<\/p>\n
That homework went beyond architecture, as Han also told CNA Lifestyle that he spent about two years reading close to 10 books, alongside oral histories and other material, while developing the film.<\/p>\n
The team also visited sites and museums around Singapore, such as Baba House, which became a reference for Fei’s family home.<\/p>\n
Animating convincing violin playing was also particularly difficult because the filmmakers did not want to hide inaccurate hand movements behind conveniently placed camera angles.<\/p>\n
“When the character plays violin, the fingering must be in the right place,” Garcia said. “You really feel the pressure. You feel the vibrato.”<\/p>\n
Han said the team spent around 18 months working on the violin animation. None of them actually played the violin.<\/p>\n
The instrument was nevertheless crucial to the film.<\/p>\n
During his research, Han spoke to a violin teacher who described it as one of the instruments closest in sound to the human voice \u2013 an idea that stayed with him because of the range of emotions it could express.<\/p>\n
Composer Ho faced a different challenge: Creating music capable of carrying Fei and Kai’s relationship across decades.<\/p>\n
“I spent months developing the main melody, the main theme, and around a year developing the soundtrack,” he told CNA Lifestyle, recalling Han’s direction to ensure “the audience will cry from the first note”.<\/p>\n
The music and animation were so intertwined that Han said there were moments when Ho was waiting for animated shots before he could score them, while the animators themselves needed the music before they could complete the scenes.<\/p>\n
“We could say it’s a story of love between two people,” Garcia said, “but it’s really a story of three people, and one of them is the music.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
OLD SINGAPORE ENTIRELY DRAWN BY HAND “While we had the work and support of many animators around the world, the entire pre-production, most of it,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":81658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dam.mediacorp.sg\/image\/upload\/s--h07OPqD_--\/c_crop,h_719,w_1279,x_1,y_197\/c_fill,g_auto,h_676,w_1200\/f_auto,q_auto\/v1\/mediacorp\/cna\/image\/2026\/09\/02\/the_violinist_film_ervin_han_raul_garcia_singapore_animation.jpg?itok=skFcQT8L","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1669,9099,1900,209,11589],"class_list":["post-81657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-news-sg-global","tag-animated","tag-awardwinning","tag-film","tag-singapores","tag-violinist","wpcat-2-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/81658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}